Tuesday, June 3

Verse of the day:

“Men of Galilee,” they said, “why are you standing here staring into heaven? Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go!” (Acts 1:11)

Hope is such a powerful tool. It’s what inspires us to keep going. It gives us something to look forward to and remind of us of the good that’s to come if we only keep pressing on. For our one year anniversary, Steph and I are going to Disney World. Now that’s some hope to look forward to!

In today’s passage, we read about the incredible hope we as Christians have for our future. As we begin the Apostle Luke’s book called Acts, we read that not only did Jesus die and come back to life, he showed over 500 people that he was alive and then flew straight into the air in front of a bunch of people! When reading this as a kid I would think, “Well where did he go? Did Jesus fly through space in a Superman pose until he breached the 6th dimension and reached Heaven?” I know, I was a very imaginative kid. The cloud the Bible says he ascended into was definitely a real cloud, but is representative of God the Father, similar to the cloud the Israelites followed by day in the wilderness after leaving Egypt. It’s not that Jesus flew so high that those watching simply lost sight of him, similar when watching a balloon float into the air, but rather that Jesus ascended into the presence of the Father affirming even more that he was the Messiah, the Chosen One of God.

The angels make it very clear that the same Jesus that the crowd just saw fly into the sky is coming back. What’s really exciting is that when he returns, we’re going to see with our own eyes the same Jesus that we read about in the Bible, the same Jesus we’ve been praying to, and the same Jesus we’ve been singing songs to and about! Jesus is going to come in the same flesh, same human nature, having the same scars from the cross in his hands that he showed his disciples when he came back to life!

There’s hope in the fact that Jesus IS going to come back in the same way he left! The Bible says that we are to encourage each other in the fact that this life is not it, that Jesus is returning for his church, for his bride, for us! As you live your life today, remember that the same Jesus that left some 2,000 years ago is coming again, and he’s coming soon!